Veeam has announced direct snapshot integration with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged platform. The deal will give Veeam a relationship with Cisco around HyperFlex now enjoyed by no other availability vendor, while at the same time giving Veeam a deeper relationship with Cisco than with any of the other hyper-converged vendor with which it partners.

The direct snapshot integration with Cisco HyperFlex is a very big deal, said Doug Hazelman, Veeam’s VP of Product Strategy.

“In availability, we want to get recovery time objectives as low as possible,” he said. “Relying on the VMware snapshot can cause some disruption in production workloads, so we have integrated in with primary storage vendors – HPE, NetApp, EMC and Nimble – using their storage systems’ capability of snapshotting. That allows us to back up more often, and without any impact on production. When Cisco came to us about this, we realized integrating with their storage snapshots is the best way to go, and so we have been working the last several months to create this integration.”

Hazelman said the resulting level of integration with the Hyperflex platform exceeds that which has been achieved so far with their other storage integrations.

“It is similar to what we have done with the other storage vendor, but is unique and even more efficient because it’s a hyper-converged platform,” he stated.

The expansion of the Cisco relationship is of critical importance to Veeam.

Andy Vandeveld, VP of Global Alliances at Veeam

“We’ve had a partnership with Cisco since 2013, and in the last 15 months it has gotten increasingly stronger,” said Andy Vandeveld, VP of Global Alliances at Veeam. “The number of customers we have around UCS and FlexPod is in the thousands, and we really want to enhance this partnership. As Cisco starts into hyper-converged, it gives us the perfect opportunity to do that. And as Cisco grows its presence in hyper-converged, we want to follow along with that.”

Vandeveld said that Veeam partnered with Cisco around Hyperflex 1.0 last year, but acknowledged that there was nothing unique about the Hyperflex-Veeam solution. That is very different in the new Hyperflex 2.0.

“In the 2.0 version, we have snapshot integration, which will really extend and enhance our partnership in a unique way,” he said. “We don’t have this type of relationship with any other hyper-converged vendor and they don’t have this relationship with any other availability vendor. We have partnerships with other hyper-converged vendors, but not to this level of integration.”

This won’t be a direct resell opportunity for the Veeam channel – unless they are also Cisco partners, which many are.

“Our common partners number in the thousands,” Vandeveld said.

The deep relationship around Hyperflex also gives joint Veeam and Cisco partners the ability to put together broader solutions.

“From an end-to-end perspective, Hyperflex is just one platform,” Hazelman said. “We have support for the UCS system. We support any VMware or HyperV platform running on UCS. Partners can put together a complete package using Cisco and Veeam, and we already have Cisco validated designs for partners to review for many of those configurations.”

The Veeam integration with Cisco HyperFlex will be available as part of the 9.5.2 release of Veeam’s Replication Suite in the second quarter of 2017.